quote: Iraqi officials said the men, who had just finished three weeks of training at the Kir Kush military base near the Iranian border, were ambushed on Saturday evening at a bogus checkpoint between Balad Ruz and Qazaniya in Diyala province, 50 miles northeast of Baghdad.

A senior defence ministry official, Brigadier Salih Sarhan, said the soldiers, who were unarmed and wearing civilian clothing, "were ordered from their buses by men in police uniforms, told to lie face down on the ground, and then shot in the back of the head".

There were conflicting reports of the number of dead but police said they had recovered 51 bodies. "It is a savage act. They were all executed," said Colonel Adnan Abdul-Rahman, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry in Baghdad.

From: No one is arguing that we should run the space program based on Physics 101. | Registered: Nov 2001
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Cueball
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4790

posted 25 October 2004 02:19 PM
I have to say this is a sad incident, part of an equally miserable war. Stupid, really, the whole thing.

I notice that the usual outraged commentary about war crimes and the brutality of some parts of the Iraqi resistance is missing from this thread. Nonetheless people should no that killing un-armed prisoners is as much a war crime as killing Keneth Bigley.

Techinically a soldier is a civilian if unarmed. It seems that no one really cares when the brown people kill each other, as usual.

[ 25 October 2004: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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DownTheRoad
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4523

posted 25 October 2004 02:32 PM

quote:It seems that no one really cares when the brown people kill each other, as usual.

I initially found it surprising that these men were travelling unarmed and without armed escort given that they would be obvious targets. Upon reflection I'm sadly not surprised at all.
From: land of cotton | Registered: Oct 2003
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al-Qa'bong
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 3807

posted 25 October 2004 08:18 PM
While I support the Iraqi struggle for national liberation, as I support the Palestinian struggle for liberation, acts such as this are right out of the Phalangist textbook and are to be condemned outright.

One's cause isn't helped by emulating the behaviour of the Hitlerjugend at l'Abbeye d'Ardenne.

quote:As many as 156 Canadian prisoners of war are believed to have been executed by the 12th SS Panzer Division (the Hitler Youth) in the days and weeks following the D-Day landings. In scattered groups, in various pockets of the Normandy countryside, they were taken aside and shot.

The abbey quickly filled with POWs captured during and after the fighting. Ten of them were randomly picked and dispatched to the chateau adjacent to the abbey; the rest were moved to Bretteville-sur-Odon. An 11th POW, Private Hollis McKeil of B Company of the North Nova Scotia Highlanders, had been wounded in the fighting near Buron and also remained behind. That evening, the 11 POWs were taken to the chateau's garden and killed. Several months later, six of the bodies were discovered with crushing blows to the head. Four more were also found afterwards; it was evident they had been shot in the head. McKeil was also later found to have suffered the same fate.

On June 8, near noon hour, seven more POWs, all of them North Novas who had been fighting around Authie and Buron, were brought to the abbey, interrogated and sent one by one to their deaths. In 10 minutes it was over -- they shook hands with their comrades before being escorted to the garden, where they were each shot in the back of the head with machine pistols.

quote: Im not sure why the nazi analogy must be made, but seeing where it comes from Im not surprised.

You seem to be so completely obsessed with the Nazi attack against the Jews that you forget that the SS killed people of other nationalities. I am frankly amazed that you never heard of the killing of Canadian prisoners at Normandy. Its quite famous.

[ 26 October 2004: Message edited by: Cueball ]

From: Out from under the bridge and out for a stroll | Registered: Dec 2003
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al-Qa'bong
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 3807

posted 26 October 2004 07:39 PM

quote:Im not sure why the nazi analogy must be made, but seeing where it comes from Im not surprised.

Are you that stunned, Mish, or are you just trolling?

In either case, if you're trying to prove you aren't an idiot, you aren't trying hard enough.

quote:Iraq's interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi, on Tuesday accused foreign troops in the country of "gross negligence" in the massacre of 49 Iraqi National Guard recruits over the weekend, an unusually critical remark by the U.S.-backed leader.

Allawi, in a weekly address to the Iraqi National Assembly, said his government had launched an investigation into the deaths of the U.S.-trained recruits, most of whom were lined up and executed shortly after sunset Saturday near the National Guard's main training base in Kirkush, about 60 miles northeast of the capital.

"A terrible crime was committed in which a large number of the ING were martyred," Allawi said. "We think this shows, in addition to gross negligence on the side of some of the multinational forces, it shows the kind of insistence to hurt Iraq and its people."

Allawi, whose interim administration assumed political authority from the U.S.-led occupation authority in late June, did not explain how foreign forces had been negligent. Efforts to reach government spokesmen on Tuesday night were unsuccessful.

Anyhoo, problem is anyone who tries to govern in the face of the colosus incompetence of the US military machine is know doubt going to get a rough ride into the boards. It is the incompetece as much as anything that makes me support immediate withdrawal. More galling idiocy is not going to repair the past acts of idiocy.

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Cueball
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4790

posted 28 October 2004 05:13 AM

quote: I initially found it surprising that these men were travelling unarmed and without armed escort given that they would be obvious targets. Upon reflection I'm sadly not surprised at all.

quote: The five policemen standing on the roof of the Albiya station had one pistol between them. They have not been issued with rifles or body armour. Three of them did not even have any documents to show they were in the police. All of them, however, have come repeatedly under fire.

[SNIP]

"I keep on reading and hearing that we have been trained and we have been given the arms necessary by the Americans. But I somehow seemed to have missed all this," he said.

"I have officers going out to face men armed with the latest guns - call them terrorists, the resistance, what you will - unarmed. It is not just they who are in danger, but their families get attacked too. I have repeatedly asked for more protection, but hardly anything ever happens. It is not just the Americans, no one from our government came to visit this station after we had so many people killed."

An officer came in, almost fell over attempting to execute an exaggerated salute, and then left after delivering some papers. "Look at that man, a new recruit sent to me," sighed the Colonel. "He is not so bad I suppose, just an idiot.

[ 28 October 2004: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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Macabee
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 5227

posted 28 October 2004 07:54 AM
Im fully aware of nazi evil. Im also aware that whenever possible the nazi card of comparision is played here by some. It trivializes that nazi evil. I wonder why some here would want to continue to inundate us with such odious and inappropriate comparisions?
From: Vaughan | Registered: Mar 2004
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Coyote
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 4881

posted 28 October 2004 12:25 PM
You trivialze Nazi and every other kind of evil with your baseless defamations. Try as you might, you will not intimidate us into decontextualizing each and every event, the one from the other.
From: O’ for a good life, we just might have to weaken. | Registered: Jan 2004
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WingNut
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 1292

posted 28 October 2004 12:42 PM
Nazism has become the text book definition of the manifestation of human evil. Anything we describe as evil in our society, today, is measured against Nazism and the acts of the Nazi state.

The evil that was Nazism did not begin and end with death camps but included silencing critics through the threat, implied and real, of physical violence, battlefield atrocities, war time atrocities committed against civilians and a basic lack of respect for any life not German.

We can see Nazi-type atrocities occuring every day in our world including the lack of respect for any life not North American in the policy decision not to record Iraqi deaths occuring as a result of western military action.

When one studies history and the rise of Nazism and cold blooded manner in which life was so easily disposed of, and then we witness similar events today where people are easily murdered in cold blood justification is provided in a cold, clinical manner, to argue we can't draw the parallel to nazism is to do a disservice to the victims of Nazism, present victims today, and to attempt to throw a blanket over the past.

It happened and it was ugly. And people no different than you and me allowed it to happen. I'm not so sure I would be willing to allow it to happen again on the basis of nazism was a "special" kind of evil.

quote: Im fully aware of nazi evil. Im also aware that whenever possible the nazi card of comparision is played here by some. It trivializes that nazi evil. I wonder why some here would want to continue to inundate us with such odious and inappropriate comparisions?

So your saying that the summary execution of 150 Canadian soldiers by the SS was trivial? I imagine it was not so for their families -- Gawd, and you hector us about children and families. What an ass.

If I were to parse every single death from the greater schema of death committed by the Nazis, I then might say that they were all mere trivialities. A composite of trivialities is then nothing but trivial. No. I am sorry, each death was a significant death in a web of death, that was not trivial in the slightest.

This incident resembles many of the crimes committed by the SS, against Canadian, Jews, the French, the Poles, the Russians and whomever else might have been deemed unfit to live. At the begining you may remember Russian Jews were shot in groups, not gassed, in very much the same manner as the Iraqi recruits being discussed here, and the Canadians at Normandy that Al Q. referenced.

[ 28 October 2004: Message edited by: Cueball ]

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addie
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 7186

posted 28 October 2004 05:21 PM
cueball ... i could not have said it better myself
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